The 33-year-old actor has just returned from a year abroad shooting Ocean's Twelve and Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm - and has gone straight into promoting The Bourne Supremacy, the action-packed follow-up to his 2002 lead role in The Bourne Identity. Indeed, he hasn't stopped since winning an Oscar in 1997 with best friend Ben Affleck but he uses his sense of humour to play down his celebrity status.

On his star status, he jokes: "When I first did Good Will Hunting, I think the paparazzi started following me for a week and then they realised they weren't going to get anything that exciting so they gave up."

"Being in such proximity to such big stars like George, Brad, Julia and Catherine Zeta-Jones has attracted more attention and made it [the paparazzi] a bit more of a concern than it normally is," he said.

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The truth is that Damon feels uncomfortable surrounded by security and would probably manage well without them. As part of his preparation to play Jason Bourne, a CIA assassin, Damon learned the ways of a professional killer.

"People ask me if I trained with anyone in the CIA or in the Special Forces and I say: 'I train with the paparazzi for this movie,' " he said, laughing.

Damon started his fitness regime for The Bourne Identity in 2002. He undertook six months of martial arts training, followed by another six months learning boxing. Then came weapons training and kung-fu fighting. This time around, the focus was more on mastering the thrilling car-chase scenes and underwater escapes.

Shooting underwater meant facing one of his biggest fears - drowning - and he spent weeks with a dive master to perfect his swimming skills, performing mundane tasks such as tying and untying knots and waiting until his air was exhausted before surfacing so he would be comfortable for the shoot.

"After the first day of shooting in a water tank in London I kept waking up anticipating the next day," he said.

"I have never had such vivid dreams of what I had gone through that day. I was just reliving being underwater, not being able to breath, calling for air. It was freaky, but I felt a huge sense of accomplishment once it was done."

It seems the sleepless nights are paying off. The Bourne Supremacy - to be released here on August 26 - debuted in the US as the top weekend movie, with ticket sales of $US53.5 million ($75 million). It has already made more than the final gross ($US121 million) of Identity, which took $13 million in Australia.

Damon - whose pay cheque tops the $US10 million he was paid for Identity - returns to Sydney tomorrow week for the Australian premiere at Greater Union Bondi Junction. Last time he walked the red carpet in Sydney two years ago, he was accompanied by Odessa Whitmore, Affleck's personal assistant whom he dated for two years. These days, he's dating 28-year-old Luciana Barroso, Miami bartender and single mum (of a five-year-old daughter).

On a personal level, he stresses the importance for him to keep that part of his life separate and private.

"I feel like people already know too much about most actors, me included," he says. "People know way more than they'd need to know to go see a movie. I didn't know anything about [Marlon] Brando, but I knew that I loved to watch him do his thing. And that was enough. So it's hard. It's just trying to find a balance."

He's mastered that balance better than Affleck, who these days is more famous for his relationships than his movie roles - but Damon is quick to defend him.

"He's as misperceived as anyone I've seen," he says. "He knew when he was in that relationship [with Jennifer Lopez] that it was the worst thing for his career. He stayed in it because he loved her."

The Bourne Supremacy will be followed in rapid succession by Ocean's Twelve, then The Brothers Grimm, Terry Gilliam's revisionist spin on the fairy-tale writers, in which they're con artists ripping off the denizens of one German town after another.

Next up, he'll play an oil executive in the geopolitical thriller Syriana, directed by Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan and based on the memoirs of a CIA agent, to be filmed in Morocco, Geneva and Washington, DC. He's also slated to star in Soderbergh's next drama, The Informant.

As busy as Damon is these days, he does not consider himself a workaholic.

"I find it too hard to turn down work, especially if it's really good because for so many years I was desperate to get a job, and couldn't," he said.

"I was going to take a nice break after Ocean's, then Syriana popped up, which was just one of those movies that I thought was exceptionally well written, really interesting and very current. I felt like I would have regretted having said no to that, as ready as I was for a break.

"So I don't know if it's being a workaholic as much as it is having a kind of common sense and feeling like these movies are really good. The last year I've worked with some just incredible directors."

And although acting has treated him well, Damon, who dropped out of Harvard University two semesters short of completing his English degree, hopes his future will include directing.

"The more involved I've become in the whole process of filmmaking, the more I really want to direct. It's really the great job, it's the ultimate job . . . on the creative side," he said.

To do it right, he plans to take it one step at a time.

"I think the first time around I'd like to do something along the lines of Good Will Hunting . . . write a script that I thought was really good, get great actors, and just try and capture performances and put it together and see if I had a knack for doing it."

It's a long way from the boy who said of his Oscar: "We feel like imposters. Hey, we're the Milli Vanilli of screenwriters!"